Replicating night tint with transparent parallax layer?

[Damascus7]

I am trying to put a day/night cycle in my game, but the catch is I don't want to use the "Tint Screen" command, but rather use parallax mapping to put a transparent layer on top of everything. This way I will be able to remove the tint around lighter areas such as under street lights. Making a whole separate map for night would normally be an option, but I would like the player sprite still looks darker or lighter depending on what area they are in, which I don't believe is possible without a transparent layer on top.

As I am using parallax mapping, I could use some guidance on how exactly to replicate the effect the Tint Screen command would have. Any tint I try to put over the picture in Photoshop just makes it look like a very fakey transparent color screen on the map.

The closest I've been able to get is using a curve layer mask, but the closer i get to the right color, the contrast gets way too stark and it kinda hurts my eyes. I could use some advice for this!

 

[gstv87]

not sure this could be done with parallax.
parallax is a background, behind everything else. I don't think it could be sent forward, or be transparent.

 

[Andar]

"tint screen" is a mathematical operation on existing pixel color numbers, and as such no overlay can directly replicate it (especially the sunset settings are difficult).

that said, "shadow" is an effect that you can create with an overlay in a different way.
use a black/grey picture where you change the opacity of most pixels to be almost transparent.
mostly transparent where you want more light, mostly opaque where you want it to be dark.

 

[Damascus7]

I thought I could maybe work around the issue by just making separate maps for day and night and limiting the amount of light that street lights give off, so that I don't have to worry about the character sprite. Then I realized that I have no way to tint the character by itself to make it truly look like night time.

I'm wondering if there's a way to design a map in such a way that the street lights will look bright and yellow AFTER a night tint is applied to it, but I'm guessing it's going to look at least some shade of blue no matter what.

I've noticed that in the picture I've attached, some parts of the map did not get tinted, and most of them are related to custom tilesets I've implemented. I'm not sure how that works, but is there a way to take advantage of that?

 

[Andar]

some parts of the map did not get tinted

wrong assumption - everything gets tinted, the tint sometimes just has no visible effect.
and that depends on the color of a coordinate as well as the tint selected.

each pixel has three color codes from 0 to 255 (RGB ).
the tint is a mathematical operation that can range from -255 to 255.
but nothing can make the resulting color to be outside of 0 to 255 color range.

so if a pixel has a color component of red 50, green 230 and blue 120, and you apply a tint of (-100, +100, +100) then the resulting color of the pixel will be R=0, G=255, B=220 - half of the red tint and most of the green tint will be lost because the mathematics go outside the color range.

Or in other words a bright tile cannot be tinted brighter by a sunset tint, and a dark tile cannot be tinted darker by a night tint and so on.
and most likely that is what you see as "no tint applied".

 

[Damascus7]

Is that true even for areas like this? The arch seems to be split in half on whether or not it's tinted, but the color values should be exactly the same.

 

[BenSD]

I know this isn't what you're asking for, but I thought I'd throw it out there: have you tried just using a lighting plugin, like community lighting? That would produce the same effect, probably be simpler, and would let you personalize lights to flicker like a fire or be different colors, etc. On the other hand, it's a little more resource intensive than tint screen or a semi-transparent layer would be.